We are going to be targeting ARMv7 nothing older I'm afraid this means
CORTEX-A8 and above (looking at A9 primarily and then the new A15 when
it's available), it gets too messy otherwise and it is already messy
enough.If you have knowledge and experience, please help out. If you
don't take part you have no justification to complain - you've got to be
in it to win it ;-)

I know we talked about this at the openSUSE conference, and I'm glad
that you are starting to kick this off, it's great.

But, what specific machine are you targeting this to run on to start
with? We need some kind of specific platform to aim for besides a
semi-vague processor level, in order to get a valid kernel and
tool-chain up and running. The kernel specifically is going to be a bit
difficult as each individual platform needs tweaks in order to have it
work properly due to the lack of discoverable busses (device-tree work
notwithstanding).

In other words, what box do I need to go buy in order to help make this
possible? :)

I think we need more than 1 board to check the port. I think Beagleboard,
Beagleboard xM or a Pandaboard could be a nice board to develop openSUSE on ARM
(in addition to qemu).

Firstly, we have to decide what kind of ARM processor we want to support. I think we
should target ARMv7 and above Application processor family (Cortex A8, A9 and above) to
have enough "power" to run openSUSE. I think we will have poor performances
with ARMv5 for openSUSE.
Then, we have to decide which optimization (in GCC) we want to enable. I would
say :
- ARM EABI with ARMv7-a instructions
- VFP (vector floating point)
- thumb/thumb2 instructions if possible (some packages do not compile with
thumb or thumb2 enabled)
- NEON (not all processor have it, maybe enable it as an option for video
libraries for examples to have good performances)